… a difficult work to judge. Read
it conscientiously from cover to cover, and you will conclude that it is the
heaviest of tasks; but then from such a reading something will cling to your
memory – odd lines, odd scenes, a peculiar flavour – till you are driven back
to it, to find that its faults are just as grievous as you first supposed but
that its merits are greater.

–– C. S. Lewis on Stephen
Hawes, Pastime of Pleasure

...it
appears confused only so long as we are trying to get out of it what it never intended
to give. It becomes intelligible and delightful as soon as we take it for what
it is – a holiday work, a spontaneous overflow of intellectual high spirits, a
revel of debate, paradox, comedy and (above all) of invention, which starts
many hares and kills none. ... There is a thread of serious thought running
through it, an abundance of daring suggestions, several back-handed blows at
European institutions ... But he does not keep our noses to the grindstone. He
says many things for the fun of them, surrendering himself to the sheer
pleasure of imagined geography, imagined language, and imagined institutions.
That is what readers whose interests are rigidly political do not understand:
but everyone who has ever made an imaginary map responds at once.

–– C. S. Lewis on Thomas More, Utopia

...I consider a happy ending appropriate to the light,
holiday kind of fiction I was attempting. The Professor has mistaken the
“poetic justice” of romance for an ethical theorem.

Lewis’s
novel That Hideous Strength (1945) contains, like most of his books, a
great number of allusions to unspecified books and situations. Here is a
listing by chapter and sub-chapter of many such words and phrases with brief
references to what I have found to be their sources. I have also included a few
other items where a short explanation may be of use to some readers. The list
is based on notes I made for my Dutch translation of this book, which was published
in 2008 as Thulcandra.

I
am referring to the full text of That Hideous Strength. An abridgement
made by the author was first published in the United States in 1946 as The
Tortured Planet and later in Great Britain under its original title. The
abridged editions now appear to be no longer available except second-hand.

Double
question marks in bold type ( ?? ) mark those places where I am still
hoping to find relevant details. Additions, corrections, and proposals for new
entries are welcome.

Dedication

J.
McNeill

Jane
Agnes McNeill (1889–1959), a Belfast friend of both C. S. Lewis and his
brother W. H. (“Warnie”) Lewis. Warnie also dedicated one of his own books to
her. Jane McNeill had a wide literary interest and she was particularly fond of
old Scottish poetry. One of her friends was Helen Waddell, a renowned
medievalist whom she knew from the days they were classmates at school. Jane
could not go to university as she had an ageing mother to care for. She was a
long-time editor of The Victorian, the magazine of Victoria College, her
school in Belfast. In chapter 10 of CSL’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy,
she makes a brief appearance as “Janie M”. She did not like That Hideous
Strength and was not pleased with the dedication.

Motto

Sir
David Lyndsay

Scottish
poet (1486–1555). Ane Dialog is a long didactic poem on the history of
the world. Its full title is Ane Dialog betuix Experience and ane Courteour
(1555), more usually known as The Monarche. The original story of the
Tower of Babel is in Genesis XI.4–9. David Lyndsay should not be confused with
the modern science fiction author David Lindsay, whose book Voyage to
Arcturus (1920) was one important inspiration for C. S. Lewis to write
science fiction.

that
hyddeous Strength

Lyndsay
was certainly using the word Strength here in its now archaic sense
of “stronghold” or “fortress”.

Preface

The
Abolition of Man

A
three-part course of lectures given by C. S. Lewis in Newcastle-on-Tyne for the
University of Durham in February 1943, and published in that same year by
Oxford University Press.

Durham

A
small cathedral town in Northern England just south of Newcastle, beautifully
situated in a bend of the river Wear. See previous note.

Olaf
Stapledon

English
writer and philosopher (1886–1950). His science fiction novel Last and First
Men (1930) was one of the things that prodded Lewis into trying his hand at
the genre. Lewis’s first attempt resulted in Out of the Silent Planet
(1938), the beginning of the Ransom trilogy. Lewis was repelled by the kind of
philosophy that seemed to be closely connected with this kind of writing; he
wanted to put science fiction to new and better uses. Stapledon in his turn had
been much inspired by J. B. S. Haldane’s essay “The Last Judgment”,
published in Possible Worlds (1927).

Numinor
and the True West, Tolkien

Lewis
of course means the fantasy world of his Oxford colleague and friend
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973). Tolkien started writing down his
“private mythology” during the First World War and continued working on it
until his death. The Lord of the Rings was published in 1954–1955 after
some twenty years’ writing and re-writing and much encouragement from Lewis
during weekly sessions in their private literary club, the “Inklings”. Since ThatHideous Strength was written in 1943, allusions to Tolkien must be
references not to the finished text of TheLord of the Rings, but
to some early prefigurations and side products which Tolkien had read aloud to
his fellow Inklings. The almost exclusively aural acquaintance with Tolkien’s
fantasy world explains why Lewis writes Numinor for Tolkien’s Númenor.
The history of Númenor and the True West is contained in The Lost Road
and in The Silmarillon,both published posthumously in 1977 and
1987, but written before The Lord of the Rings.

Chapter
1 Sale of College Property

(1.1)

the
liturgy

The
chapter “Solemnization of Matrimony” in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.

John
Donne

English
poet (1572–1631). He pioneered a grim type of love poetry – i.e. he gave poetic
expression to a grim view of erotic love – which according to C. S. Lewis was
the reason why Donne was being overrated by twentieth-century readers (cf.
Lewis’s 1938 essay “Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century” in Selected
Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper, 1969, pp. 106–125). Jane Studdock has
chosen a fashionable subject and has fashionable ideas on it.

Love’s
Alchymie

A
poem from Donne’s Songs and Sonnets (1631).

(1.2)

Henry
de Bracton

Medieval
English lawyer (†1268), author of an important work on common law. He argued
that the highest authority in the country, i.e. the King, is not above
the law: “The King is under the Law for it is the Law that maketh him a King”
(thus quoted and translated by C. S. Lewis in English Literature in the
Sixteenth Century, 1954, p. 48).

Bracton
College, Fellows

British
universities (like the fictitious “University of Edgestow” in the present book)
are traditionally loose associations of individual “Colleges”, each College
having its own name, governing body, staff, buildings, property and traditions.
The College buildings were usually grouped around one or more courtyards called
Quadrangles, or Quads, as described in chapter I.3. “Fellow” is the usual
designation of a staff member.

elected
to a Fellowship

A
new Fellow was usually appointed after comparative examinations and a ballot by
the sitting staff.

it
was still sweet in the mouth

Cf.
Job 20:21.

Watson

Friend
and adviser to Sherlock Holmes in the detective stories by Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle (1859–1930).

...liked
his papers better than yours

Curry
is referring to the comparative exam which Mark had to take when applying for
his Bracton fellowship (see note on “elected to a Fellowship”, above).

Distributivism

Properly
called Distributism, this is an ideal or theory of small-scale economic
organization which had some currency in the early decades of the twentieth
century, notably among Roman Catholics. Its chief spokesmen were G. K.
Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

(1.3)

Inigo
Jones

English
architect and theatre designer (1573–1652).

Bunyan

John
Bunyan (1628–88), English Puritan preacher and writer; author of The
Pilgrim’s Progress.

Walton

Izaak
Walton (1593–1683), a Royalist and an Anglican, was not a regular writer or
scholar, but nevertheless wrote two books which became very well-known: the Lives
(a collection of short biographies, including one about John Donne) and a book
on angling and the English countryside, TheCompleat Angler
(1653).

Cromwell

Oliver
Cromwell (1599–1658), Puritan leader of the parliamentary army during the
English Civil War. After the execution of King Charles I, Cromwell became Lord
Protector of the Commonwealth for the last five years of his life. Shortly
afterwards the monarchy was restored.

Merlin
who was the Devil’s son

In
the Historia Britonum, compiled by the Welsh monk Nennius (c. 800
A.D.), there is a story about a boy with prophetic powers who had not been
begotten by a father. The boy’s name is Ambrosius and the events take place
around the year 430 A.D. In Welsh legend, Merlinus (Myrddin) was originally the
name of a bard and seer who lived in the second half of the sixth century, i.e.
much later than the aforementioned Ambrosius. Still many more centuries later,
about 1140, Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his Historia Regum Britanniae (History
of the British Kings) whichincluded the story about the unfathered
young prophet (VI.17–19). The boy is now called Merlin, however, and elsewhere
in the book he figures as a magician. Geoffrey, overlooking a time-gap of some
150 years between Ambrosius and Merlin, explains that Merlinus “was called
Ambrosius”. It was also Geoffrey of Monmouth who, in Latinizing the Welsh name
Myrddin, had changed d into l to avoid associations with French merde,
“shit”. With all its (now) glaring historical inaccuracy, Geoffrey’s book started
off the great tradition of Medieval Arthurian literature, which flourished
especially in France (Chrétien de Troyes, †c. 1183). In France, this
continually expanding tradition was dubbed matière de Bretagne to
distinguish it from the matière de France (stories about Charlemagne) –
hence the English term matter of Britain. By the early thirteenth
century, Merlin’s fatherless provenance was often understood to mean that he
was fathered by the Devil.

(1.4)

“red
tape” was the word its supporters used

One
example of this use which was certainly known to Lewis is in J. B. S. Haldane’s
essay “Nationality and Research”, in Possible Worlds (1927):

Probably a standard
educational system is an evil, as government officials always tend to demand
quantity rather than quality of work, and research flourishes best in an
atmosphere where leisure and even laziness are possible. On the other hand, a
government department like the Medical Resarch Council in England, which is not
dominated by red tape and is willing to subsidize work that may turn out to be
valueless (...) can be of enormous use to science.

Further
mentions by Lewis of “red tape” in this books are in chapters

– 3.4, Fairy Hardcastle speaking

– 5.1, “an immense programme of vivisection, freed at last from Red Tape
and from niggling economy...”

– 5.2, “...what [Mark] had learned, in the Progressive Element, to
describe as “settling real business in private”, or “cutting out the Red Tape”...”

– 6.4, in Mark’s piece of popular journalism.

(1.5)

Mrs
Dimble ... Cecil Dimble

According to James
Patrick, the Dimbles and their salon across the river “are surely drawn from
Clement and Eleanor Webb” and their home at Holywell Ford, “a medieval mill house across the
water walks from Magdalen” – see Patrick’s The
Magdalen Metaphysicals: Idealism and Orthodoxy at Oxford, 1901-1945)
(1985), pp. xii and 45, with a portrait on p. xxxvii. Clement C. J. Webb
(1865-1954) was an Oxford philosopher and historian with a sideline in
theology. He was noted for his scholarly treatment of “the entire succession of
philosophers whose thought about God formed the background for
twentieth-century natural theology”; of “The Idea of Personality as Applied to
God” (title of a 1900 essay); and of the relationship between Christianity and
history (Patrick, pp. 36-40).

Lewis
also briefly referred to Clement Webb (as “C. J.”) at the end of the Space
Trilogy’s first volume, Out of the Silent
Planet, chapter 22; and, later, in his autobiography Surprised by Joy, chapter 14, where he mentions Webb as one of
“five great Magdalen men who enlarged my very idea of what a learned life
should be”.

Malory

Sir
Thomas Malory (†1471), author of Le Morte Darthur (published in 1485), a
large collection of Arthurian stories. King Arthur did not always figure
prominently in them; the curious title was originally meant to cover only the
last part. Over the centuries the book went through many editions and it is the
source for most subsequent English-language versions of King Arthur (except attempts
at Celtic reconstructions). A manuscript version of the book was not
discovered until 1934 and the first revised edition was published in 1947.

the
Grail

A
mysterious chalice or bowl, first mentioned by Chrétien de Troyes in his last,
unfinished work Perceval (or Le Conte del Graal). Later authors
and re-tellers developed this object into the cup used by Christ during the
Last Supper and afterwards used by Joseph of Arimathea to collect the blood of
Christ after He died on the Cross. Generally spoken, the Grail in Arthurian
stories is an object of great significance and infinite value – often thought
or found to possess healing or life-protecting power – while the “Grail King”
or “Grail Keeper” usually is an exalted figure, and often a wounded man. In
Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal, the greatest medieval Arthurian work
in German, the Grail is a stone without any specified function or virtue.

Layamon

Author
of a long poem in early Middle English, Brut (c. 1190), which
tells the history of Britain from the Fall or Troy to the late 7th century. It
is the first text in English mentioning Arthur and several other early British
heroes: all the earlier authors, such as Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth,
wrote in Latin. “Brut” is Brutus, great-grandson of the early Roman hero
Aeneas. He is presented as progenitor of the British kings and the name Brittannia
is declared to be derived from Brutus.

Chapter
2 Dinner with the Sub-Warden

(2.1)

Non-Olet

Latin
for “It doesn’t stink”. The full phrase, Pecunia non olet (“Money
doesn’t stink”) is ascribed to the Roman Emperor Vespasianus referring to the
tax proceeds from public toilets.

Clausewitz

Karl
von Clausewitz (1780–1831), Prussian general, author of Vom Kriege (On
War) and other works on the art of war.

Othello’s
occupation would be gone

Cf.
Shakespeare, Othello III.3, 357; the aptness of this quotation in the
given circumstances is of a wholly superficial nature.

Sandown

Probably
an oblique reference – though not a very significant one – to Strandtown,
the area of Belfast, Northern Ireland, where C. S. Lewis had his parental
home.

(2.4)

Belbury

According
to Joseph Pearce in C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church (2003), p. 93,
this might be a play on the name of Blewbury, a village some fifteen miles
south of Oxford. While Lewis wrote the Ransom trilogy, controversies were going
on over the foundation of an atomic plant near Blewbury. In 1946, the Atomic
Energy Research Establishment (AERE, or “Harwell Laboratory”) was opened at the
former RAF base of Harwell, near Blewbury. This was the site of the first
nuclear reactor in Europe.

Chapter
3 Belbury and St Anne’s-on-the-Hill

(3.2)

Hingest

This
name – or more accurately “Hengist” – is arguably one of the two first specifically
English names in recorded history, as distinct from British (Celtic) names.
Some very old sources mention Hengist and Horsa as the two brothers who, by the
middle of the 5th century A.D., led the first group of Anglo-Saxon invaders or
immigrants to Britain. Horsa didn’t survive very long; Hengist was later
declared to be progenitor of the Kings of Kent. His death is recorded in
Nennius’s Historia Britonum (see note to chapter 1.3, above), in the
same section (§56) that contains one of the earliest mentions of Arthur.

de
Broglie

Louis-Victor,
Duc de Broglie (1892–1987), French physicist, Nobel Prize winner in 1929. His
name is pronounced so as to rhyme with French feuille. In June 1921, de
Broglie was present at an academic ceremony in Oxford where C. S. Lewis, still
an undergraduate, had to make a brief public appearance as he had won the
“Chancellor’s Prize” in an essay contest. Afterwards Lewis wrote about this in
a letter to his brother: “From a great deal of snobbish reference, which
sounded less vulgar in Latin, I gather he [de Broglie] is of a great house” (Collected
Letters, Vol. I, p. 557).

Almanac
de Gotha

Reference
work on European nobility and royalty, first published in 1764 in de German
town of Gotha.

Filostrato

In
view especially of Mark’s talk with the Italian professor in chapter 8.3, it
seems just possible that Lewis named him after the Greek writer Flavius
Philostratus II (c. 165–250 A.D.). See CSL’s English Literature in the
Sixteenth Century III/2, p. 320:

...citing the works of
Pheidias, and ... adding those of Praxiteles, [Philostratus] says that they
were never produced by imitating nature. “Imagination made them, and she is a
better artist than imitation; for where the one carves only what she has seen,
the other carves what she has not seen.” (De Vita Apollonii, vi. xix). In the third century Plotinus
completes the theory ... Art and Nature thus become rival copies of the same
supersensuous original, and there is no reason why Art should not sometimes be
the better of the two. Such a theory leaves the artist free to exceed the
limits of Nature.

Inglesaccia

Inglese
is Italian for “English(man)”; -accio or -accia is a pejorative
suffix.

(3.3)

Peter
Rabbit

I.e.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), a children’s book by Beatrix Potter.

Romance
of the Rose

A
13th-century French narrative poem, Roman de la Rose. It consists of two
very different sections, written by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung
respectively. In the first part, a lover in his dream sets out to find the
perfect lady; she is symbolized by a rose which he is going to pick in the
Garden of Love. The Roman de la Rose is the subject of chapter 3 in
C. S. Lewis’s book The Allegory of Love (1936).

Klingsor’s
garden

A
reference to Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal (1882), Act II, and to the
medieval poem on which it is based, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal.
Klingsor is a wicked sorcerer who has stolen the Holy Lance; Parsifal is the
young hero who is going to retrieve it. He gets into Klingsor’s garden where he
has to resist the charms of flower-shaped women.

the
one book that lay on the table in the middle of the room ... “The beauty of the
female is the root of joy to the female as well as to the male” etc.

This
unspecified book and the passage found by Jane are part of the fiction, as
attested by Lewis in two letters (Collected Letters III, pp. 699 and
1360):

– to Ruth Pitter, 31 Jan. 1956, “The passage is, so far as I know, my own
invention, influenced, I think, by Coventry Patmore. I am not now sure that it
is very relevant in its place.”

Lewis
very probably named her after the warrior-maiden in Vergil’s Aeneid,
VII, 803–817, and Book XI, 498–835.

(3.4)

suffragettes

Early
20th-century name for women who actively advocated female suffrage, i.e.
extension of the right to vote so as to include women.

Chapter
4 The Liquidation of Anachronisms

(4.1)

to
behave like the Sword of Siegfried

In
other words, to prevent lovers from having sexual intercourse; a reference to
Richard Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods: Act
2, Scene 4). When Brünnhilde accuses Siegfried of having “extorted lust and
love” from her, Siegfried denies the charge, pointing out that he has placed
his sword Notung between them when he wooed her for his blood-brother
Gunther.

I do not know of any story or passage in Arthurian legend or Germanic mythology
featuring Siegfried’s sword in this function. There is, however, at least one
relevant story in medieval legend about another hero’s sword. Tristan lay his
sword between himself and Isolde in their bed when he had cause to fear they
might be caught together by Isolde’s husband. Interestingly, this husband’s
name is Mark; cf. note to chapter 10.2. The sword lying there was apparently
thought to be sufficient proof that they had no intercourse with each other
(Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan, XXVIII, 17.398–17.413).

Ibsen

Henrik
Ibsen, (1828–1906), Norwegian poet and playwright; Mrs Dimble is referring to
the figure of Aline Solness in his play The Master Builder (Bygmester
Solness, 1892), Act 3. Aline had been mother of twin boys who had died as
babies shortly after a fire in which their home had burnt to the ground.
Recalling this, Aline tells her friend Hilda that she doesn’t actually deplore
the loss of her boys since “We ought to feel nothing but joy in thinking of
them; for they are so happy –so happy now”; but that “it is the
small losses in life that cut one to the heart”. These losses include “nine
lovely dolls” which had been lost in the fire: “The dolls and I had gone on living
together. (...) I carried them under my heart – like little unborn children.”

(4.3)

They
will gnaw their tongues and not repent

Cf.
Revelation of John, 16:10–11.

Cyrus

Cyrus
the Great, King of Persia. In 539 bc,
he conquered the New Babylonian empire and shortly afterwards allowed the Jews
to leave their place of exile and go back to Palestine. The Jews had an
understandably high opinion of Cyrus: in Isaiah XLV.1, he is called the Lord’s
“anointed” (messiah)

There
is no turning back once you have set your hand to the plough

Luke
9:62. “And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and
looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Know
you not that we shall judge angels?

I
Corinthians 6:3.

(4.4)

Raleigh’s
fine phrase

Lewis
is not quoting the English Renaissance poet and explorer Sir Walter
Raleigh (1552–1618), but the first Professor of English Literature at Oxford,
of the same name, who died in 1922, a few months before Lewis began studying
English there. Raleigh’s letters were published in 1926; the fine phrase is
quoted from a letter of 25 January 1912 to the poet and literary critic Edmund
Gosse. “I do find the obituary a difficult instrument to play.”

(4.7)

Saeva
sonare verbera, etc.

Virgil,
Aeneid VI, 557–558: description of the noise coming up from Hell at the
gate.

P.M.

Prime
Minister.

Chapter
5 Elasticity

(5.1)

Quisling
government

A
puppet government collaborating with a foreign power; named after Vidkun Quisling
(1887–1945), a Norwegian collaborator with the Nazis. Miss Hardcastle is
referring to the French “Vichy” government led by Philippe Pétain in the years
1940–1944.

Basic
English

A
simplified form of English for international use with a vocabulary of less than
1,000 words, designed by two British linguists, C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards
(Basic English and Its Uses, 1943); the “free-thinking Cambridge don” is
Richards.

monarchist
and legitimist

Legitimism
is the idea that succession to the throne is to be regulated by a fixed set of
rules – usually primogeniture – and ought not to be a matter of choice or
deliberation or popular favour.

(5.2)

It
was a Friday

This
is not in accordance with Saturday being the day of Mark’s first visit to Belbury
(chapter 2.2). Counting from there, the present section starts with Mark waking
on what ought to be Wednesday. As appears from the letter which he writes later
this day, it is 21 October. Counting back from here (Wednesday 21 October), the
story begins on Friday 16 October. See also notes to chapters 7.1 and 11.2.

He
[Laird] got a third

I.e.
he got a third (lowest) degree university diploma. Cf. Curry’s remark in
chapter 4.7, “I’m not quite happy about his bad degree”.

nasty,
poor, brutish and short

From
Thomas Hobbes’s description of humanity in its primeval state: “...continual
fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short” – Leviathan (1651), I.13.

(5.3)

the
Sura

A sura
is a chapter of the Koran. Lewis here seems to use the word as a fictitious
name for a semi-fictitious figure. He may well have been thinking of Sadhu
Sundar Singh (1889–1929), an Indian mystic who was born into a Sikh family and
became a Christian in 1904. Sadhu is a Hindoo title for a wandering holy
man. For most of his life after 1904 Sundar Singh travelled through India and
Tibet as a Christian sadhu. He visited Europe (London and Amsterdam,
among other places) on two occasions during the years 1920–22. In 1929,
travelling on foot to Tibet, he disappeared without a trace in the Himalaya.

Chapter
6 Fog

(6.2)

a
cloud no bigger than a man’s hand

1
Kings 18:44. “Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s
hand.”

(6.3)

bloods

Senior
pupils of a “Public School” who have reached the top of the school’s social
hierarchy. C. S. Lewis’s associations with the word bloods are
vividly illustrated in chapter 6 of his autobiography, Surprised by Joy
(1955).

Ovid,
“Ad metam properate simul”

Ars
Amatoria (The Art of Love) II, 727 – “hurry on to the
finish [i.e. orgasm] together!” Ovid was a Roman poet living from 43 bc till 18 ad.

Dunne

John
William Dunne (1875–1949), Irish pioneer aviator. In addition to flying, he
developed a theory of “serialism” from experiences like Janes Studdock’s dreams
in That Hideous Strength. He supposed Time to be a thing with infinitely
many dimensions, each dimension having its own chain or series of events. He
thought it an illusion to think of time as one-dimensional; occasional escapes
from this illusion were possible in special circumstances, e.g. during dreams.

witches
prophesying on a blasted heath

Cf.
the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Rubicon

Small
river on the eastern coast of Italy north of Rimini. In 49 bc, Julius Caesar deliberately started
a civil war by crossing the Rubicon to the south.

(6.4)

the
Stagyrite

Aristotle,
the ancient Greek philosopher (born in Stagira, Macedonia).

“peace-effort”

A less-than-ingenious
pun reminding the British public c. 1946 of their recent “war effort”.

Gestapo

Secret
police of Nazi Germany, Geheime Staats-Polizei.

Ogpu

Secret
police of the Soviet Union in the years 1923–1934.

Chapter
7 The Pendragon

(7.1)

“We
have your letter of the 10th”

The
date is impossible: Mark’s letter in chapter 5.2 is dated 21 October and Jane’s
letter was written a few – apparently three – days later. The mistake can be
explained. From a comparison between the first British and first American
editions of That Hideous Strength, it appears that Lewis originally
wrote the story having in mind 1 October as Day One but later decided,
presumably with a view to the descriptions of the season, to shift the story
half a month on. If this is what happened, he further seems to have failed to
make all the necessary changes where days and dates were concerned. See also
notes to chapter 5.2 and 11.2.

Fisher-King

The
Fisher King is a personage in (high) medieval Arthurian legend, introduced by
Chrétien de Troyes in Le Conte del Graal. Perceval first meets the
Fisher King as an old fisherman who shows him the way. Later he meets the same
man as a king lying in bed with an incurable wound. A procession carrying the
Grail enters the room and passes by the bed where the wounded king lies.
Perceval, from a knightly sense of propriety, does not ask questions about the
meaning of this, only to discovers later on that he would have procured the
fisher king’s recovery by inquiring.

(7.2)

I live
like the King in Curdie

A
reference to The Princess and Curdie (1883), a novel by George Macdonald
(1824–1905). The miner’s boy Curdie discovers that the king has long been given
drugged wine; together with the princess he succeeds in providing the king with
regular meals of safe, undrugged bread and wine.

Brobdingnag

The
land of giants in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), by Jonathan Swift.

(7.4)

Black
and Tans

British
volunteer army fighting Sinn Féin in Ireland in the years around 1920; black
and tan were the colours of their uniform.

Chapter
8 Moonlight at Belbury

(8.2)

“Be
glad thou sleeper and thy sorrow offcast. I am the gate to all good adventure”

After
Chaucer, The Parliament of Fowls, 131–132. The author, after reading
Cicero’s Dream of Scipio until nightfall, has his own dream of meeting
Scipio the Elder, who leads him to a medieval-style Garden of Love. Over the
gate of this garden two very different messages are written, one inviting, the
other alarming. Each is a regular seven-line stanza, and lines 5–6 of the
inviting one are

This
is the wey to al good aventure.

Be glad, thow
redere [reader], and thy sorwe of-caste.

the
Curdie books

George
Macdonald, The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and The Princess and
Curdie (1883). The latter book was mentioned by the Director in chapter 7.2
(see note there).

Mansfield
Park

Jane
Austen’s fourth novel (1814), written between Pride and Prejudice and Emma.

Mr.
Bultitude

The
name is borrowed from Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers (1882), a famous
school story by F. Anstey, where Mr. Bultitude is magically transformed into
his son and vice versa.

(8.3)

A
king cometh, who shall rule the universe...

Isaiah
32:1.

Chapter
9 The Saracen’s Head

The
Saracen’s Head

In
the Middle Ages, especially during the Crusades, “saracens” was the usual word
for Muslims or Arabs. The turbaned head of an Arab was sometimes used as a
“charge”, or decorative element, in heraldry. Such a head also appeared as a
decoration over the entrance of inns and taverns and so lend the establishment
its name, “The Saracen’s Head”. Lewis is of course referring to Alcasan.

(9.2)

he
“discovered in his mind an inflammation swollen and deformed, his memory”

??
(cf. Jane’s waking in chapter 8.2)

(9.3)

General
Assembly over the water

MacPhee,
the “Ulsterman”, is presumably descended from a protestant Scottish family that
came to Northern Ireland in the late seventeenth century. He appears to stick
to an old habit of talking about Scotland as a country “over the water” even
though he is now living in England – where a phrase like “North of the Border”
would have been more appropriate.

Covenanters

Radical
Protestants (Scottish Presbyterians) during the English civil war in the
mid-seventeenth century.

“Fool,
all lies in a passion of patience”, etc. / Taliessin through Logres

The
line is quoted from the poem “Mount Badon”, in Taliessinthrough
Logres (1938), a cycle of Arthurian poems by Charles Williams (1886–1945). Taliessin
was followed in 1944 by another cycle, The Region of the Summer Stars.
Williams was one of C. S. Lewis’s two chief fellow “Inklings”, the other being
J. R. R. Tolkien (see note to Preface, above). Among the various
Williamsian motifs in That Hideous Strength, perhaps the most important
one is the idea of an ancient ideal (viz. Logres, the fallen kingdom of Arthur)
kept alive by a small community (here the company of St Anne’s).

Robert
Burns

Scottish
poet (1759–1796).

the
spear-head of madness

Lewis
here joins together various things associated with the goddess Diana or Artemis
– a “moon goddess” who also was goddess of hunting and of wild animals. The
madness meant here could be “lunacy”: a “moon-stricken” condition inflicted by
the nymphs who follow Artemis on her roamings through woods and fields. As the
leader of such a company, Artemis might be viewed as its “spear-head”.

See also Lewis’s ruminations in his essay “The Seeing Eye” (1963), about the
prospect of humans traveling to the moon. Stating three reasons to hate this
prospect, he mentions as his first, “merely sentimental, or perhaps aesthetic”
reason that “the immemorial Moon – the Moon of the myths, the poets, the lovers
– will have been taken from us for ever. Part of our mind, a huge mass of our
emotional wealth, will have gone. Artemis, Diana, the silver planet belonged in
that fashion to all humanity: he who first reaches it steals something from us
all.”

the
Pendragon of Logres

Pendragon is a Welsh title for a chief
or leader. The word originally means something like “head dragon” or “chief
dragon”. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Merlin gave this title to King
Arthur’s father, Uther, who was henceforth called Uther Pendragon. In medieval
Arthurian literature he remained the only one to carry the title, which
therefore does not appear to have been inheritable. Logres is derived from Lloegyr,
the ancient Welsh name for what came to be called England (Angle-land)
from the ninth or tenth century onwards – or at least for that part which was
associated with King Arthur. In Charles Williams’s Arthurian poems, a tradition
of Companies of Logres is just about to start rather than being an age-old
phenomenon. A twentieth-century Pendragon of Logres is probably an original
idea of Lewis (see note above). There is a possible source, though, in Evelyn
Underhill’s novel The Column of Dust (1909). In 1943 Charles Williams
published an edition of Underhill’s letters and in his preface discussed that
novel. 1943 was the year in which That Hideous Strength was written.

(9.4)

Baron
Corvo

Pseudonym
or pen name of the English novelist Fredrick Rolfe (1860–1913) – whose style
Lewis once described as “one of the most preposterous I have ever read, and I
doubt if I ever saw so much pedantry combined with so much ignorance” (letter
to Arthur Greeves of 1 October 1934, Collected Letters II, p. 143). Corvus
is the Latin word for “raven”, a bird closely related to the jackdaw.

Oyéresu

Plural
form of oyarsa, the incorporeal being governing a particular planet and sharing
its name. In Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, Ransom meets the oyéresu
of Mars and Venus respectively. An oyarsa is a kind of “eldil” (see MacPhee’s
explanation to Jane about the organization of life at the Manor, in chapter
9.3).

(9.5)

Faustus

Semi-legendary
German magician and astrologer from the early 16th century; principal character
of some famous plays (Marlowe, Goethe) and musical compositions (Wagner,
Berlioz, Gounod).

Prospero

A
magician in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest.

Archimago

A magician
in The Faerie Queene, an unfinished long poem by Edmund Spenser
(1552–1599).

after
the fall of Numinor

In
Tolkienian mythology, the end of the Second Era as described in The
Silmarillion and in The Lost Road. The episode shows similarities to
the story about the Tower of Babel and also to That Hideous Strength.

Francis
Bacon (1561–1626), English statesman, philosopher and essayist, whose works
include The Advancement of Learning (1605) and the The New Atlantis
(unfinished, 1626).

“attained
not to greatness and certainty of works”

This
may not be a literal quotation, though the wording is certainly very
Bacon-like. Bacon would not necessarily have applied it to magicians or magic
only, but rather to all forms of knowledge which he did not consider useful. He
often stressed the need and the possibility for mankind to accumulate “useful”,
scientific knowledge. C. S. Lewis when talking about Bacon often stressed the
similarity of this ideal of knowledge with sheer lust for power – a lust which
he suspects Bacon shared with the magicians of his (Bacon’s) day. See Lewis’s The
Abolition of Man, chapter III, paragraph 16 (“Nothing I can say will
prevent...”).

Atlantis

Tolkien
regarded the story of Númenor as his own adaptation of the Atlantis myth. Plato
in his dialogues Kriton and Timaeus described Atlantis as a big
island or a continent in the Western ocean which had sunk away and submerged
about 9000 years before the days of Solon, who heard this story from an old
Egyptian priest, and told it to the son of a friend, who told it to his grandson
Kritias, who told it to Socrates (Timaeus
20e, 22b, 23d-25d).

To
those high creatures whose activity builds what we call Nature...

Lewis/Ransom
is here toying with the idea that terrestrial, “sub-lunary” Nature was created
not directly by God but indirectly, through the agency of “created virtue”, as
Dante called it (Paradiso VII, 135: creata virtù); cf. Lewis’s The
Discarded Image (1964), end of chapter 5. The idea reappears also in
Tolkien’s “creation myth” as presented in The Silmarillon and in his posthumously
published History of Middle Earth, vol. 5 (1987).

élan
vital

“Life
force” – a concept of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941).

panpsychism

The
doctrine that not only humans and animals but also plants and inanimate objects
have consciousness.

The
London Metropolitan Police, or more particularly its criminal investigation
branch; named after the street near Westminster Bridge where its headquarters
were located until 1967. Scotland Yard was under direct control of the Ministry
of Home Affairs.

(10.2)

To
bluster a little as an injured husband in search of his wife

In
the Arthurian tradition, King Mark (or March) is the “injured husband” of
Isolde, Tristan’s mistress (cf. note to chapter 4.1 on the Sword of Siegfried).

(10.4)

the
sadness that came over him had novelty in it ... Brother Lawrence

Nicolas
Herman (1614–1691), born in Lorraine, entered the Carmelite Order in Paris as a
lay brother in 1640 and took the name Lawrence of the Resurrection. When
Brother Lawrence had died, his abbot compiled two little books from his notes
and letters and from reminiscences of conversations with him. The two books
together came to be known under the title La pratique de la présence de Dieu
(The Practice of the Presence of God; a new critical edition was
published in 1991 and a new English translation in 1994).

The
words quoted by Dr Dimble are from the second Entretien (Conversation):
“Je ne ferai jamais autre chose, si vous me laissez faire”. The confession
characterizes one milestone in Brother Lawrence’s spiritual development – the
stage where he resigned himself to the fact that an awareness of being near to
God must be invariably spoiled by a feeling of utter unworthiness. Lewis’s
reference to “novelty” may mean he is suggesting a similar piece of spiritual
progress in Dr Dimble. The situation is described toward the end of ch. IV of The Problem of Pain:

... we actually are, at
present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God,
as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a
fact: and I notice that the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware of that
fact.

Chapter
11 Battle Begun

(11.1)

They
had tried to do that to Merlin

Ambrosius
or Merlin – in the old story referred to above (see note to chapter 1.3 on
Merlin) – was sent for by King Vortigern after the latter’s three consecutive
failures to build a fortress, which collapsed each time. The King’s magicians
had advised to find a fatherless child (i.e. a child not begotten by a man),
kill it, and sprinkle its blood over the building: this would prevent further
collapsings. The boy is found, but he puts the magicians to shame by pointing
out the real reason why the building would not stand, and by giving more proofs
of “prophetic” powers.

(11.2)

“We
are acting on an order dated the 1st of October”

In
the first British edition, the date here is 14 October. The latter (and later)
date is probably in accordance with Lewis’s final view of the matter: see note
to chapter 7.1. Counted back from the dates in chapter 5.2, Day One of the
story is Friday 16 October. This same date would have been a suitable one for
the order, too, perhaps more so than 14 October.

occultation

Eclipse,
temporary disappearance from sight.

(11.3)

John
Buchan

Scottish
writer and politician (1875–1940), author of a 24-volume history of the First
World War and some biographies, but chiefly known for his many adventure
stories, including Prester John (1910) and The Thirty-Nine Steps
(1915; later filmed by Alfred Hitchcock).

Chapter
12 Wet and Windy Night

(12.3)

Old
Solar

The
“Great Tongue”, mentioned in chapter 10.4. Old Solar is the interplanetary language
which Ransom learned on Mars (Malacandra) and which was also in use on Venus
(Perelandra) – see the two previous volumes in the Ransom trilogy.

(12.5)

Barfield’s
“ancient unities”

Owen
Barfield (1898–1997) and C. S. Lewis were exact contemporaries and as Oxford
students they became each other’s best friends for some time. Barfield became a
lawyer but also wrote some philosophical works. Lewis gratefully adopted some
of his ideas, including the theory of “old single meanings” or “ancient unities”
as expounded in Barfield’s Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (1926, new
edition 1952). Barfield shows how primitive man employed many concepts, and had
in fact many experiences, which in the course of time have broken up into very
different, often irreconcilable parts. For example, “spirit” originally meant
(1) breath or wind, and (2) principle of life with humans and animals; but it
never meant either: it always meant both. No one would make the distinction,
since there was no awareness of a literal as against a figurative sense or even
of an object’s different aspects. This theory of primitive speech and thought
is further developed into ideas about language and poetry (“language is fossil
poetry”) and about the “evolution of consciousness”.

Lewis
gives a summery of this view of the “ancient unities” in Miracles, chapter 10, par. 18 (“We are often told that primitive
man...”)

(12.6)

the
Atlantean Circle / the Great Atlantean

This
“background” of Merlin does not go back to any Arthurian stories but was
invented by Lewis for the present occasion (cf. note to chapter 13.5 about the
“seven bears”).

the
Great Disaster

The
end of Atlantis or the fall of Númenor; in Tolkienian mythology, the end of the
Second Era (see two notes to chapter 9.5, above).

Chapter
13 They Have Pulled Down Deep Heaven on Their Heads

(13.1)

Numinor,
the True West

Lewis
makes a bad mistake here. In Tolkien’s scheme of things (see notes to Preface and
to chapter 9.5, above), the True West is not Númenor, but Valinor. This
is the land of the Valar – a species of gods or angels. Númenor is the land
created by the Valar to the west of the other, older countries, but still east
of Valinor.

Abhalljin,
beyond the seas of Lur in Perelandra

“Abhalljin”
is an old form (invented by Lewis) of Avalon – the island where King Arthur was
brought after being wounded in battle, not in order to die there but to recover
and then to return. Lur is a place where the King of Perelandra stayed for some
time and received instruction; see the last chapter of Lewis’s Perelandra.

(13.3)

the
stroke that Balinus struck

Balin
was a hot-tempered knight (or prospective knight) at King Arthur’s court. In a
fit of anger he hurts Pellam with the Holy Lance, the spear that was used to
pierce Christ on the Cross. Through this “Dolorous Stroke”, a sacrilege, the
surrounding country turns into barren land for many years. The story came up in
the thirteenth century and was included in Malory’s Morte Darthur, Book
II.

Apuleius

Roman
author of the 2nd century ad.

Martianus
Capella

Latin
author from Carthago, in North Africa, 5th century ad.

Hisperica
Famina

Early
medieval text, probably originating from 6th-century Ireland or Wales;
notorious for its idiosyncratic form of Latin, some other examples of which
have been ascribed to Gildas and to St Columba.

Merlinus
Ambrosius

This
“full name” of Merlin is Lewis’s further development of what very probably
began as a piece of sloppiness by Geoffrey of Monmouth; see note to chapter
1.3, above.

(13.4)

It
was so silly not to have realized that he wouldn’t know about forks.

The
use of forks for eating was not introduced until the late seventeenth century and
after that took a century, or perhaps much longer, to spread from high society
down to the lowest social strata – as pointed out by Norbert Elias in The
Civilizing Process (1939), Part 1, ch. IV/10. Indeed, Lewis in chapter 12.6
pictures the tramp, too, as someone who “was apparently unacquainted with
forks”.

the
poem about Heaven and Hell eating into merry Middle Earth

??

the
bit in the Bible about the winnowing fan

Isiah
30:24.

Browning,
“Life’s business” etc.

Robert
Browning (1812–1889), The Ring and the Book X, 1235–1237: “White shall
not neutralise the black, nor good / Compensate bad in man, absolve him so: /
Life’s business being just the terrible choice”.

fate, longaevi

Fate
is the plural form of fata, which is Italian for “fairy” (fata Morgana
= Morgan le Fay, King Arthur’s hostess in Avalon). Longaevi is a Latin
word used by Martianus Capella (see note to chapter 13.3, above) for
“long-lived beings”. C. S. Lewis gave a survey of early medieval ideas
about these beings in The Discarded Image (1964), chapters III.D and VI.

magia,
goeteia

Two
Greek words for “magic”. During the Renaissance the two words were sometimes
used distinctively – magia forwhite and goeteia for black
magic. Magia is also a Latin word for magic, derived from a Persian word
for “priest”.

(13.5)

the
last of the seven bears of Logres

In
a letter of October 1952 C. S. Lewis wrote, “The seven bears and the
Atlantean Circle are pure inventions of my own, filling the same purpose in the
narrative that “noises off” would in a stage play.” The Atlantean
Circle is mentioned in chapter 12.6.

the
days when Nimrod built a tower to reach heaven

In
Genesis 10:10, just before the story of the Tower of Babel, it is said of
Nimrod that Babel and a few other towns in the land of Shinar were “the
beginning of his kingdom”. This in itself would not seem sufficient ground to
suppose that Nimrod built the Tower, yet the idea has a long tradition which
includes Augustin’s De civitate Dei and Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Blaise

This
figure first appeared as Merlin’s secretary in French Arthurian stories around
1300. “Blaise” is a gallicized form of Bleheris, which is the name of a
12th-century Welsh bard. In the 19th century, Blaise appeared as Merlin’s
master, Bleys, in Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King: “The Coming of
Arthur” II, 358–396.

I
am not the son of one of the Airish Men. That was a lying story

See
note to chapter 1.3 on Merlin. In addition to the Devil, there were other spiritual
beings who were sometimes supposed to be Merlin’s father – not all of them
necessarily evil spirits (cf. the passage on fate and longaevi in
chapter 13.4).

the
time when Logres was only myself and one man and two boys

He
may be thinking of the episode in Malory’s Morte Darthur I.5 about
Merlin, Sir Ector, young Arthur and Kay (with Kay as the “churl”).

Cathay

This
name for China did not yet exist in Arthurian times. (But of course neither did
the whole Arthurian tradition exist in Arthurian times.)

Chapter
14 “Real Life is Meeting”

“Real
Life is Meeting”

Martin
Buber (1878–1965), Ich und Du, part one, section 14 (or 13 in English),
last sentence. The book was first published in 1923, translated into English by
Ronald Gregor Smith as I and Thou in 1937, and re-published with an
added epilogue in 1958. While Lewis began writing That Hideous Strength,
in 1942, he was feeling a recent impact from reading I and Thou, as
appears from two letters he wrote in the summer of 1942: one to Sister Penelope
on 29 July, and one to Owen Barfield a few days later (Collected Letters
Vol. II, pp. 526 and 528). Remarkably, Lewis did not so much tell these
correspondents his own opinion of the book, but asked for theirs. In February
1943, Lewis alluded to I and Thou toward the end of The Abolition of
Man. Twenty years later he did so once more, in chapter 4 of his last book,
Letters to Malcolm, where he appears to be at last quite unreserved in
his praise for Buber.

The Buber quotation here clearly serves to reflect chapter 14’s last episode,
on Jane Studdock’s great personal turning point. That episode, in turn,
reflects what Lewis later described as an “ambiguous moment” in his own life:
“Freedom, or necessity? Or do they differ at their maximum?” – Surprised by
Joy (1955), chapter 15, par. 8.

The Thou meets me through
grace – it is not found by seeking. But my speaking of the primary word to it
is an act of my being, is indeed the act of my being.

The Thou
meets me. But I step into direct relation with it. Hence the relation means
being chosen and choosing, suffering and action in one; just as any action of
the whole being, which means the suspension of all partial actions and
consequently of all sensations of actions grounded only in their particular
limitation, is bound to resemble suffering.

The primary
word I-Thou can be spoken only with the whole being. Concentration and
fusion into the whole being can never take place through my agency nor can it
ever take place without me. I become through my relation to the Thou;
as I become I, I say Thou.

All real living
is meeting.

Lewis’s
phrasing – “Real Life” not “Real Living” – suggests that Buber’s work may have
come to his attention through a little book published in England in 1942, Real Life is Meetingby J. H. Oldham. The title of Oldham’s book is also the title of its
second chapter, which deals with Buber’s I and Thou.

(14.1)

Waddington
... Existence is its own justification. The tendency to developmental change...

C. H.
Waddington (1905–1975), English embryologist and geneticist; here quoted and
paraphrased from Science and Ethics (1942). This slim volume contains a
brief essay by Waddington, “The Relations between Science and Ethics”, followed
by comments from a great variety of other authors and several replies from
Waddington. C. S. Lewis attacked Waddington in The Abolition of Man (chapter
2, note 3), summarizing Waddington’s position by quoting the phrase “existence
is its own justification” from Science and Ethics, page 14, where
Waddington writes:

...there are many propositions
for which it is clear that no ulterior criterion for value is necessary. The
statement that it is as well not to put your hand in the fire is not based on
anything else except the fact that if you do it will cease to be a hand: and
existence is its own justification; hands are the kind of things which do not
go in fires.

Professor
Frost goes on to paraphrase a sentence from Waddington which is also the next
thing quoted by Lewis in his note to The Abolition of Man:

An existence which is
essentially evolutionary is itself the justification for an evolution towards a
more comprehensive existence. (Science and Ethics p. 17)

Huxleyhimself
... Romanes lecture

Thomas Henry
Huxley (1825–1895), English biologist and popular writer on science, leading
champion of Darwinism in his day. The Romanes lectures, given in the Sheldonian
Theatre in Oxford, were founded in 1891 by Huxley’s friend George Romanes
(1848–1894), who was also a biologist.

Professor Frost means that if a man of Huxley’s stature could find no better
support for moral judgements than mere emotion, then surely no better support
is available. Frost implies that emotions are absolutely futile. He also
implies, in using the phrase “Huxley himself”, that Huxley’s views were broadly
in line with his own; but this is demonstrably untrue. Huxley’s Romanes
lecture, “Evolution and Ethics” (1893), was an eloquent call to follow the
banner of ethics against evolution since it was clearly impossible to derive
ethics from evolution. The words quoted by Frost can be found in a passage
toward the end:

...the practice of that which
is ethically best – what we call goodness or virtue – involves a course of
conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in
the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it
demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all
competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but
shall help his fellows; its influence is directed, not so much to the survival
of the fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible to survive. It
repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence.

The
lecture was published, along with “Prolegomena” of about equal length and
extensive notes, in Evolution and Ethics and other essays (1894); the
passage quoted is on pp. 81–82. Huxley’s position is summed up one page further
as:

Let us understand, once for
all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic
process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.

In
spite of this, the further progress of evolutionary biology inspired some of
its later practitioners to make fresh attempts to base ethics on evolution.
Notable among these in Great Britain, apart from C. H. Waddington (see previous
and next note), was T. H. Huxley’s grandson Julian Huxley (1887–1975).
Half a century after his grandfather’s Romanes lecture, he was invited to give
one on the same subject, which he did under the subtly changed title
“Evolutionary Ethics” (1943). The two lectures, along with the older Huxley’s
Prolegomena, were reprinted together in 1947 with an introduction and two
further essays by the younger Huxley as Evolution and Ethics 1893–1943.

The view expressed by Frost has perhaps never been expressed so starkly by any
real 20th-century scientist, let alone any moral philosopher. However, Lewis’s
contemporaries Waddington and Julian Huxley were certainly closer to it than
the older Huxley had been. On the question whether Frost is too much of a
caricature, see Lewis’s letter of 8 December 1959 (“The devil about writing
satire now-a-days is that reality constantly outstrips you”) and Walter
Hooper’s note in Collected Letters, Vol. 3, pp. 1104–1105, with
rare but highly relevant references to Julian Huxley.

An fine overview of more than a century of failed attempts to base ethics on
evolution is offered in The Temptations of Evolutionary Ethics (Univ. of
California Press, Berkeley etc. 1994) by Paul Lawrence Farber. Commenting on J.
Huxley and Waddington, Farber notes that “philosophers could have dusted off
nineteenth-century critiques on evolutionary ethics in response, but most did
not think the musings of scientists important enough to make the effort” (171).
One philosopher of the period who did make a brief effort was D. Daiches
Raphael in his essay “Darwinism and Ethics”, in A Century of Darwin, ed.
S. A. Barnett (Heinemann, London etc. 1958), pp. 334–359, where both
Waddington’s and J. Huxley’s positions are thoroughly demolished.

as
an actuarial theorem

That
is, as a matter of pure statistics. The word “actuarial”appears in the
same passage where Waddington mentions the “definite integral”. The Huxley
quotations were also used here by Waddington (Science and Ethics, p. 16–17):

To Huxley, the cosmic process
was summed up in its method; and its method was “the gladiatorial theory of
existence” in which “the strongest, the most self-assertive tend to tread down
the weaker”, it demanded “ruthless self-assertion”, the “thrusting aside, or
treading down of all competitors”. To us that method is one which, among
animals, turns on the actuarial expectation of female offspring from different
female individuals, a concept as unemotional as a definite integral ...

“things
of that extreme evil which seem innocent to the uninitiate”

G.
K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (1925), chapter VI, ninth paragraph.
After a chapter on pre-Christian “day-dreams”, Chesterton deals with the
“nightmare”, i.e. after the human forms of paganism, he describes those
perverse and inhuman forms which paganism is always in danger of taking. –

This inverted imagination
produces things of which it is better not to speak. Some of them indeed might
almost be named without being known; for they are of that extreme evil which
seems innocent to the innocent. They are too inhuman even to be indecent.
(quoted from p. 141 in the 1947 Hodder & Stoughton edition)

Healthy
paganism is embodied in ancient Rome, supremely in the poet Vergil, while “the
other kind of paganism” was embodied in Rome’s great enemy Carthage, heir of
the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon, with its “religion of fear, sending up
everywhere the smoke of human sacrifice”. Chesterton describes the Punic wars,
i.e. the long struggle between Rome and Carthage, as a major contest of light
and darkness and the destruction of Carthage as a major victory of real over
perverse civilisation.

The
evil role played in Chesterton’s account by Hannibal’s elephants in this
struggle (“...it was Moloch upon the mountains ... it was Baal who trampled the
vineyards” – ch. VII, par. 15) is curiously inverted by the elephant in Lewis’s
chapter 16.1 as it destroys a modern Carthage by its own ancient weapon.

(14.2)

Cnossus

Chief
city of Crete in the Minoan (pre-Greek) period, second millennium bc.

(14.3)

Mr.
Bultitude’s mind was as furry....

This
exercise in animal psychology may well have been at least partly inspired by J.
B. S. Haldane’s essay “Possible Worlds”, in the book of the same name (1927).
In a passage about dogs he writes, among other things, “I doubt if a dog would
ever arrive at our idea of a thing, at least for objects with
interesting smells.”

(14.5)

Titian

Tiziano
Vecellio (1490?–1577), Italian painter in the Venetian school; his works
include many mythological scenes. In Surprised by Joy (ch. XIII), Lewis
includes Titian among a few examples of what he calls “the resonant, dogmatic, flaming,
unanswerable people” (italics mine).

You
had better agree with your adversary quickly

Cf.
Matthew 5:25.

Upon
them He a spirit of frenzy sent To call in haste for their destroyer

Milton,
Samson Agonistes (1671), 1675, about the Philistines gathering in the
building where Samson was brought to “bring them sport” (Judges 16:21–31).

Among
them he a spirit of frenzy sent,

Who
hurt their minds,

and
urged them on with mad desire

To
call in haste for their destroyer.

(14.6)

This
demand ... was the origin of all right demands and contained in them.

...it is the duty of, or at
least the honest trying to do many another duty, that will at length lead a man
to see that his duty to God is the first and deepest and highest of all,
including and requiring the performance of all other duties whatever.

This
passage is included in Lewis’s George Macdonald: An Anthology (1946) as
part of Nr. 226.

whether
it was in the moulding hands or in the kneaded lump

Cf.
a further passage from Macdonald’s same sermon, Nr. 235 in Lewis’s Anthology:

Statue
under the chisel of the sculptor, stand steady to the blows of his mallet. Clay
on the wheel, let the fingers of the divine potter model you at their will.

those
who have not joy

??
Probably a quotation or otherwise fixed phrase; source not found.

Chapter
15 The Descent of the Gods

(15.1)

See
thou do it not! ...fellow servants

Cf.
Revelation 19:10 and 22:9.

the
slayer of Argus

In
Greek mythology, Argus was a monster with a hundred eyes, whose obvious job
therefore seemed to be watch-keeping (hence the expression “Argus-eyed”). Hera,
wife to Zeus, asked him to watch Io the priestess and keep her from seducing
Zeus. Hermes (=Mercury) was then asked by Zeus to kill Argus. Hermes complied
by putting Argus to sleep with a magic wand and then killing him.

Mercury
and Thoth

Hermes,
the Greek god of commerce and of learning, was identified by the Romans with
their own god Mercury, while the Greeks identified him with Thoth, the Egyptian
moon god and guardian of writing and arithmetic, among other things.

all
Arabia

cf.
Shakespeare, Macbeth V.1, 49: “All
the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”

the
inconsolable wound with which man is born

“Inconsolable
wound” is a phrase possibly borrowed from Ovid, Metamorphoses
V, 426. Borrowed or not, the slightly curious use of the word
“inconsolable” is also found in Lewis’s essay “The Weight of Glory” (1941),
fifth paragraph. There he talks of “the inconsolable secret in each one of you
– the secret which hurts so much that...” etc.; he is clearly referring to the
experience described in Surprised by Joy as “Joy” and an “inconsolable
longing” (SbJ chapter 5, second paragraph). The idea of our being “born
with” or “born for” something that hurts is expressed by Lewis also (1) in The
Pilgrim’s Regress, VII/9, where Mr Wisdom mentions “the sorrow that is born
with us”; and (2) in the last paragraph of Reflections on the Psalms,
where Lewis talks of the “tyranny of time” and our hope finally to escape from
it “and so to cure that always aching wound (“the wound man was born for”)
which mere succession and mutability inflict on us, almost equally when we are
happy and when we are unhappy.” The latter instance may well be an unchecked
Hopkins quotation (see the last of my Notes on Reflections on the Psalms). The
combined idea – of a wound that is both “native” and inconsolable – only
appears in the present passage in That Hideous Strength.

King
William said, Be not dismayed, etc.

From
an anonymous song, “The Boyne Water”, celebrating the battle of the Boyne
(1690). A Protestant army led by King William of Orange defeated a much larger
Jacobite army led by the Catholic James II. It was a decisive moment for the
advance of Protestantism in Ireland. Duke Schomberg, a commander in the
Orangist army, was shot while crossing the Boyne river, after which “Brave
boys”, he [William] cried, “be not
dismayed / For the loss of one commander, / For God will be our king this day /
And I’ll be general under.”
The song was included in Robert Young’s The Ulster Melodist (1832)
and also in Pádraic Colum’s Anthology of Irish Verse (1922).

Mars,
Mavors, Tyr

Mavors
is an old form of “Mars”. Tyr or Tiwaz is a Germanic deity that was identified
with the Roman god Mars. The third day of the week, called Martis dies
in Latin and martedí in Italian, was “Tiwaz-day” with the ancient
Germans, hence modern English Tuesday, German Dienstag, Dutch dinsdag,
etc.

fields
of Arbol

Arbol
is the sun. In Perelandra, “the field of Arbol” is the usual term for
“the Solar system” but on one occasion is used in the plural form, apparently
denoting the orbits of planets around the sun. This latter meaning seems to
apply here.

(15.5)

Haeckel,
McCabe, Reade

Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), German biologist
and philosopher, leading champion of radicalized Darwinism in Germany, author
of The Natural History of Creation (Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte,
1868). In his “monistic” worldview humans are a part of nature and no
distinction is made between god and world; his thought became increasingly
animistic or pantheistic in character. Joseph
McCabe (1867–1955) left both the Franciscan Order and the Roman Catholic
church in 1896 to become a militant rationalist and freethinker and a prolific
writer. Winwood Reade (1838–1875), author
of many books on Africa, also wrote TheMartyrdom of Man (1872),
a popular bird’s-eye view of world history containing much of his criticism of
established religion.

For an excellent account of the kind of ideas referred to by these names, see
Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th
Century (1975), especially chapter 7, “Science and Religion”.

The
Golden Bough

A
thirteen-volume “study in Comparative Religion” by James Frazer (1854–1941), published
in 1880–1915; abridged edition 1922.

Chapter
16 Banquet at Belbury

(16.2)

Qui
Verbum Dei contempserunt, etc..

??
(It may or may not be a quotation.)

Artemis

Greek
goddess of hunting; her Roman counterpart was Diana (cf. note to chapter 9.3 on
“the spear-head of madness”).

“made
him al the cheer that a beast can make a man”

Malory,
Morte Darthur XIV.6, said of a lion that had been fighting a serpent and
received help from Sir Percival. Percival thought the lion “the more natural
beast of the two”. – “And the lion went alway about him fawning as a spaniel.”

A
fictitious place-name recalling the opening scene of the trilogy in Out of
the Silent Planet where Dr Elwin Ransom, on a walking tour near Sturk,
meets Professor Weston and Richard Devine, the later Lord Feverstone.

Chapter
17 Venus at St Anne’s

(17.2)

like
starlight, in the spoils of provinces

From
Ben Jonson’s play Volpone, or The Foxe (1606), III.7, “Why
droops my Celia?”, where Volpone invites his beloved to enjoy all the riches he
has to offer her:

...See,
behold,

What
thou art Queene of; not in expectation,

As
I feede others: but possess’d, and crown’d.

See,
here, a rope of pearle; and each, more orient

Then
that the brave Aegiptian Queene carrous’d:

Dissolve,
and drinke them. See, a Carbuncle,

May
put out both the eyes of our St Marke;

A
Diamant, would have bought Lollia Paulina,

When
she came in, like star-light, hid with jewells,

That were the spoyles of
Provinces.

(17.4)

Barbarossa

Frederick
I Barbarossa (c. 1123–1190), King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor.
Like King Arthur, he was considered to have been cast into an enchanted sleep
from which he would return at some future date – originally at the end of the
world.

Enoch
or Elijah

Two
Old Testament figures whose life on earth is described as having ended without
death; see Genesis 5:24 and II Kings 2:11 respectively. Enoch has been thought
in legend to have spent 300 years learning cosmological and other secrets from
the angels; Elijah acquired a role in later Old Testament and in New Testament
times as a figure who was to return some day.

the
Third Heaven

In
medieval cosmology, the Heavens were a system of seven revolving spheres, i.e.
hollow globes of different sizes, each sphere being contained by the bigger and
containing the smaller ones. At the centre was the Earth. The spheres were
wholly transparent but one planet was fixed in each of them and so made their
revolving movement visible. From small to large and thus increasingly distant
from the Earth these spheres and their planets were called the Moon (“first
Heaven”), Mercury, Venus (“third Heaven”), Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. The further
planets of our solar system have never been taken up in this model as they were
not discovered until modern times (Uranus in 1781, Neptune in 1846, Pluto in
1930).

Aphallin

Another
fictitious ancient form of the name Avalon (see note to chapter 13.1,
above).

there
was a moment in the Sixth Century...

The
high point in (King) Arthur’s career was the battle of Mount Badon, or Badon
Hill (cf. Merlin’s ruminations during the Mars episode in chapter 15.1; see
also note to chapter 9.3 on Taliessin). This battle seems to have taken place
in the first half of the 6th century or around the year 500 ad.

Mordred

A
nephew or natural son (in some accounts both) of King Arthur; he tried to
dethrone Arthur but was killed in the attempt while Arthur was badly wounded
and went to Avalon (see note to chapter 13.1, above). The name “Mordred” was
originally spelled “Modred”.

Milton,
Cromwell

Cromwell:
see note to chapter 1.3. John Milton (1608–74), a great poet and great scholar,
was on Cromwell’s side during the English civil war an held a high office in
the Commonwealth government. However, he was a much more honourable figure than
Cromwell and a keen defender of the liberty of press and of conscience.
Milton’s principal work is the long poem Paradise Lost (1667).

Sidney

The
poet Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86), author of the (prose) romance Arcadia,
was an able and respected English diplomat. He died in the Netherlands, near
Zutphen, from wounds inflicted by a Spanish fusil bullet. In line with commonly
accepted evaluations of Sidney both as a poet and as a man, C. S. Lewis has
called him “dazzling”: “he is that rare thing, the aristocrat in whom the
aristocratic ideal is really embodied” (English Literature in the Sixteenth
Century, III/1, p. 324).

Cecil
Rhodes

English
businessman (1853–1902), chief representative of British imperialism in
southern Africa. Present-day Zimbabwe was called Rhodesia, after him, in the
years 1964–1978.

Uther,
Cassibelaun

Uther
was King Arthur’s father and the first to be given the name or title of
Pendragon (see note to chapter 9.3, above). Cassivelaunus was one of Julius
Caesar’s fiercest opponents during the latter’s second expedition to Britain in
54 bc. Geoffrey of Monmouth
called him Cassibelaun and a forefather of Uther.

As
one of the modern authors has told us, the fire from Heaven must descend...

Charles
Williams in He Came Down from Heaven (1938), chapter 2. See also Lewis’s
letter to Charles Williams of 7 June 1938 and Walter Hooper’s note 21 in Collected
Letters, Vol. II (2004), p. 227–228.

If
we’ve got an ass’s head...

A
reference to Bottom in the third Act of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s
Dream.

Trahison
des clercs

“The
Treason of Clerks”; title of the principal work (1927) of the French writer
Julien Benda (1867–1956). The “clerks” in question are the educated members of
Benda’s own generation, especially in France and Italy; their “treason” was
their failure to stand firm for Enlightenment ideals (“knowledge values”)
against the rising tide of nationalism and irrationalism (“action values”). In
a more general way, it is the kind of treason committed wherever dangerous fads
are not being exposed and denounced by the educated class.

(17.6)

Sine
Cerere et Baccho

Fragment
of a Latin saying taken from the comedy Eunuchus by the Roman author
Terentius (2nd century bc). Sine
Cerere et Libero friget Venus: “Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus will
freeze”, i.e. “Whithout food and drink, love will cool down.”

She
comes more near the earth

Shakespeare,
Othello V.2, 113–114; not a literal quotation. Othello is not
talking about Venus but about the Moon.

So
geht es im Schnützelputzhäusel...

Anonymous
18th-century German song, published in 1807 in the Sammlung deutscher
Volkslieder (Collection of German folk-songs) compiled by J. G.
Büsching and F. H. von der Hagen.

(17.7)

Beauty
too rich for use, for earth too dear

Shakespeare,
Romeo and Juliet I.5, 47.

How
had he dared? ... her sacrosanctity ... He was discovering the hedge after he
had plucked the rose

Cf.
what Lewis wrote towards the end of The Allegory of Love (pp. 343-344) about the allegorical
passage in Spenser’s Faerie Queene (IV.x.53) where the old medieval
ideal of Courtly Love is finally transformed into the new ideal of virtuously
romantic marriage. Scudamour

plucks Amoret from her place
among the modest virtues. The struggle in his own mind before he does so, his
sense of “Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear”, is a beautiful
gift made by the humilities of medieval love poetry to Spenser at the very
moment of his victory over the medieval tradition:

my
heart gan throb
And wade in doubt what best were to be donne;
For sacrilege me seem’d the Church to rob
And folly seem’d to leave the thing undonne.

Updates

16
November 2007 (added reference to Owen Chadwick in note to chapter 15.5).

14
April 2008 (added note to chapters 3.2 on Filostrato; more about Sidney in note
to 17.4)

9
May 2008 (added notes on ‘red tape’ in 1.4 and on Mr. Bultitude in 14.3)

4
August 2008 (added note on ‘things of that extreme evil’ in 14.1)

7
August 2008 (improved note on Walter Raleigh in 4.4)

28
August 2008 (on ‘Be glad thou sleeper’, in 8.2; note on ‘things of that extreme
evil’ in 14.1 improved)